I have always thought of this part of the country as a sort of cultural Black Hole. There are strange survivals from the past—habits and rituals and almost Neanderthal attitudes. We have our share of really crazy people, too—more than it is comfortable to think about.
The gill net grew like magic. The shuttle flipped in and out, back and forth in the gnarled fingers, and King Deport never looked down to see what they were doing. He had made so many over the years that those fingers needed no supervision from the rest of King. Which was fine with me—that left time and attention for storytelling.
Make no mistake, King’s stories were the best of their kind. I’d thought it when I was a bug-eyed boy of eleven, and when I went back as a grown man, I found them even better than I remembered, a funny reversal of the usual order of things. I might not have gone back to the woodsy East Texas country where I grew up, if it hadn’t been for King and his tales. My folks were gone, moved to Houston, and I hadn’t much to return to but the woods and the river and King.
He was the one who started me collecting tall tales and strange stories, first for fun and then for profit. Once I had my degrees, it was a part-time profession, then full-time. The first book-length collection hit the market just as people were ripe for nostalgia mixed with humor. As it was the result of years of research, it also hit the academics favorably. That first book made a hefty profit for the publisher, and they wanted more.
I had some fine years of travel to Europe, Africa, the Orient, even Lapland and Alaska, seeking out oldsters with tales to tell. And the books did well enough to free me from teaching and the apple-polishing that goes along with it. That suited me fine.
Once I had enough squirreled away to take care of myself and my wife for the rest of our lives, I just sat back and asked myself what it was that I wanted to do. At forty I wasn’t ready to quit work, certainly. The children were young, but they were also independent and busy. Callie, my wife, had her anthropological research to do, and didn’t want to worry about my being at loose ends.
That’s when I decided to go back to the root and source of my interests, back to Skillet Bend and the river, the big woods that even the loggers hadn’t been able to clear out—and King Deport. He was still active and alert, though he was at least eighty. He had seemed old when I was eleven, which meant he was probably forty then. You can hardly produce wrinkles as deep as his in less time than that.
I packed up my kit, kissed Callie goodbye, waved to the boys, who were headed out on an expedition of their own, and took off for Skillet Bend, Texas, population 225. My Dad’s old friend, the postmaster, had volunteered to put me up, when I wrote to ask about King, so I had a headquarters right down close to the river and the river bottom for which I was headed.
I was shocked when I saw the way the woods had been devastated, as I drove through the cut-over remnants toward the town. The primal forest of my boyhood was reduced to scrub and stands of pole pine that the timber companies planted where old forests of mixed hickory and gum and oak and pine and ash had stood. I didn’t like it, and I wondered about the wildlife. I figured King could tell me. He watched the wild with care, and he always had a sensible view of anything going on.
Not being eleven any more, I minded my manners and went to dinner with some old friends of my folks. Then I went fishing over the weekend with Ben. So it was three days before I could take off on my own and scout out the woodsy world that had been the joy of my boyhood. Once I got right deep into the wild country, it wasn’t so bad—there were still places so remote and swampy that it was too hard to get in with loaders and skidders and trucks.
Down on the river was state land. They had built a big lake twenty years ago and bought up all the access land upstream from the place where the Nichayac ran into the catchment. There was still some huge timber there, far back in where timber thieves couldn’t handily go. I hoped the cutting on the banks had been done by thieves. I still had the illusion that the state had more sense than to cut off ground-cover along the waterside.
At the mud ramp, where fishermen launched their boats, I backed my borrowed pickup truck and off-loaded the light aluminum boat I had also borrowed. To get in to find King, you had to know how to do it. I hoped I remembered.
Once I was sliding down the current between the overhanging willows lining the bank, I felt suddenly as if the decades had evaporated. I was still a boy on the way to see my friend and hero. I almost checked out my old trotline spots, out of habit, as I moved along, but the dead trees I’d used as markers were long gone, and the willows there were the great-grandchildren of those to which I had tied my lines.
So I eased along, using the paddle now and again to maneuver around a sand bar or a snag. Before I knew it, I was at the mouth of the creek where I had to leave the boat. There was a good stout post there, where King’s infrequent visitors could tie up securely. His own boat was hidden someplace so secure that not even I had ever been able to find it.
Once afoot, I went along the worn path, smelling the mellow woods-scent of home. There wasn’t another to match it. Africa smelled strong and alien. Europe had a distant effluvium of too many people in the same place for too long. The Orient mostly stunk. East Texas woods smelled like rain on new grass, leaves quietly mulching for generations, and strong old trees waiting out the years wrapped in clean and peeling bark.
I was grinning like a fool by the time I rounded the last bend in the path and saw King’s shanty leaning against the tremendous pine he’d chosen as its prop and stay. I paused and pursed up my lips. The tooo-whee! whistle that had been our signal cut through the rustling quiet.
There was no reply for maybe a minute and a half. Then a tremulous reply came to my ears. I ran to the door and pushed. It hung low on its leather hinges and scraped the floor, but I automatically lifted, and there was King, sitting by a smudge of fire, though it was already getting hot so late in the spring. His lap was full of gillnet, as usual, though two hoop-nets leaned against the far wall, one already fitted with all its netting, the other halfway done.
He looked up but didn’t try to rise. That told me a lot about what time had done to him. In the old days, he would have met me before I got to the door.
“Bam,” he murmured. “Alabama Vincent Tremaine! Never thought to see you agin, boy. Come set by me and tell me how it’s gone, all these years since your folks moved off. By gum, boy, I never would of dreamed you’d come back. They tell me you teach in a college, or did. And write books!” His tone was full of awe, and I suddenly recalled that he never went to school in his life. He couldn’t read a book, much less write one.
I sat beside him on the short-legged stool that had always been my place, and told him about my life and travels. His questions and comments amazed me with their insight into the ways people related with each other, no matter where they were. When I said something about it, he laughed.
“Folks is folks, Bam, wherever they live. All of ’em pretty well act the same when you poke ’em with a stick. “
Which I suspect may be perfectly true.
Then I questioned him about the woods and the beasts he knew so well. I also asked about the depredations of the loggers, and that was when his face went grim, his fingers slowed on the shuttle.
“Stupid bastards! Log the riverbanks so the land just slides off down into the Gulf of Mexico. Cut the woods and leave the critters to move or die. They’d be right down here with their damn chainsaws and mechanical monsters, if....” His voice dwindled to silence.
“If what?” I asked. There had been something in his tone that sent a chill up my back.
He looked at me through the light, which was partly sunlight filtered through that granddaddy pine tree, partly red light from the coals on his hearth. His eyes, black as swamp water, were thoughtful, sizing me up as a man, the way they’d done when I was a boy. He nodded, a mere dip of the chin.
“I reckon I can tell you, Bam. Nobody else knows, but you I can trust. Could from Day One. Only been two boys I ever knowed that was trusty, and t’other was my son. He’s been gone...but that’s of no account. You I can trust, same as I could him. But never let a hint slip, not till I’m dead and gone.”
“Hope to die,” I said, with the old fervor.
He sighed. His hands moved faster, as the gillnet grew. “Well, you know I heired all this land from my folks. My great-great-great-granddaddy had it on a grant from the King of Spain. That’s why all the oldest sons was named King, kind of in appreciation, you see?” I nodded, for I’d heard that before. “I never let no logger set foot here and never will as long as I hold breath. They know that. Many’s the lawyer’s come all the way, duded up in shiny boots and fancy khakis, to see can they hornswoggle me into signing some of their papers.”
He cocked his head to look me in the eye. “Happen you remember I can’t read. Don’t sign nothing I can’t read, so I don’t sign nothing at all. I send ’em all back to town to Mr. Jenkins. He taken care of my Dad, and he’s took care of me. But I guess some of them bastards figured I was getting too old to look to my affairs. You know better, boy, and others do too, but loggers ain’t what you’d call real bright, or they’d be doing something else in the world besides messing up the woods.”
“They tried to steal your timber?” I asked. The idea shocked me, though I knew timber theft was common.
“You recall Rupe Hendricks?” he asked.
The name rang a dim bell in my memory. A shape formed around the name: a tough, square boy with just enough brains not to be an idiot, but not any over and to spare. He had, if I recalled, enough meanness to make up for any amount of dumbness. “I remember,” I said.
“Thought you might. You beaten the tar out of him once, when he made trouble for your little brother. Well, he come down here onto my land, marking my trees. They figured that if they knowed just what they wanted to take out, then they could sneak in, cut ’em, and float ’em downriver, catching ’em at the bend above Bobcat Creek. I dunno how they thought to get the things to water, but they might have intended to bring mules across my property line to drag ’em. Anyway, they sent Rupe in to mark.”
He bent and lifted a snuff can from the hearth and spat a stream of tobacco juice into it, put the lid on neatly, and set it back. “That boy knowed timber, if nothing else. He marked the big walnut by the creek, first off. All the biggest pines. Must’ve hurt his soul to pass by mine here, but he didn’t dare come close to the house. There’s a big stand of ash he intended to take—every bit of it, but I dunno what for.
“All the big hickories was marked, probably for railroad ties. He didn’t miss a trick. But of course I caught on the first time I cast around the woods. You can’t mark a tree so I don’t see it. I didn’t know who, right then, but I for certain knowed what.” He leaned back in his hickory splint chair to ease his back and stretched his fingers, cracking the knotted joints. Then he picked up the shuttle.
“You recall the big slough over at the edge of my land, where Grampa Catfish lives?”
Having tried for half my young life to catch Grampa, I would never forget that muddy stretch that was so much deeper than it looked.
“That’s where I caught up with him. Waited for days before he come, but I knowed he would. That stand of pine has been what most of the lawyers wanted, and I knowed no timber-marker could pass it up. Soon’s as I seen it was Rupe, I knowed I was in trouble. You know how mean he was, and I was pretty old and stove up, even then. In my prime, I’d have tied him into a bow-knot and hung him in a tree, but that’s a good many years back, and was then too.
“Anyway, he looked up from his mark and seen me watching. Never paused nor howdied, just come at me like a catamount. Now you know, Bam, I never go no place without my stick. Even when I was young, I taken it along for snakes. You can’t carry a stick for sixty years without getting to know how to handle it. So I knocked him in the head, hard as I could. Didn’t faze him.” He chuckled.
“Onliest thing that boy ever used his head for was to hold up his hat. Solid bone, it was. I tripped him, next pass he made at me, and set on his back while I got my wind. Had to keep whacking his head to keep him from bucking me off, but it worked.”
I felt a cold knot in my stomach. If what I was thinking had happened….
“Then I got mad. Here was this peckerwood cruising my land, ready to steal my trees, and trying to beat me up for catching him at it. Purely unreasonable, I thought it to be. I seldom lose my temper, Bam. One reason I live so far from folks is because I know I’ve got one, so I keep it where it can’t do no harm. But he come to me. And I was hot. Hot as a firecracker.”
“What did you do...with him?” I asked, half choked.
“Why I fed him to Grampa Catfish. Drug him kicking and squealing right to the edge of the slough, after I’d tied him up with my belt and his galluses. Called the Old Man offen the bottom. Did you know I could do that? We come to an agreement, long years ago, boy. I’d go down and feed him trash fish outen my nets. He knowed when I called it meant food. Anyway, I called him and shoved Rupe in.
“In a minute, there come a thrashing in the water. Grampa must weigh a couple of hundred pounds by now. Thereabouts. There was some bubbles and a bit of blood, and then nothing. So I come home and thought about it.” He stopped his busy fingers and looked at me.
“You see, boy, when you’re old as I am, used to living alone in the woods, you can’t stand trials and jails and all such like that. Even did they find me innocent of anything but self defense, I’d die in the middle of it. I’ve got to live out my time right here, taking care of my woods. So I never said nothing. And if the thieves suspicioned what happened, they kept it to themselves. Couldn’t do much else, could they?
“Rupe’s little wife is married to a real man, now. Got two little girls and is happier than she’s ever been, I’m told. So I think what I done was maybe right. Not legal, but right.”
I’d lived for a long time in the civilized world and been contaminated by its ways. Now I put myself back into the old ways I’d learned as a boy from the old men sitting in the store on Saturdays. You took care of yourself and your own. You asked nothing of anyone. You did what seemed right at the time and lived with the result. By his own code, King had done nothing wrong.
I smiled. “I remember Rupe,” I said. “If you hadn’t killed him, he would have killed you, just for the hell of it. He tried it with me once, and he nearly succeeded. I figure Grampa Catfish was just what he deserved.”
The rest of the visit was full of stories. Trees and animals I had known were dead but not forgotten. Places were changed, but King was not. When I left, he looked at me a bit anxiously.
“Hope to die,” I repeated, and that was enough for him.
I have kept my word. Now he is dead and gone, his place tied up tightly as a gift to the Nature Conservancy, and I can tell his last, best tale. It’s one that moderns won’t approve, but that’s neither here nor there. A day will come again, I suspect, when everyone must care for his own. King knew how. His generation knew how.
I am not so certain about ours.